What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing such an experiment. Lastly, if someone did produce an experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is, an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the same, but the result of the experiment being different, then the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible would be wrong. It isn't axiomatic.
>try to keep focus on just what we observe
That's all science is though – making observations. Writing hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?
> What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality?
I was thinking photons which, when passed through a diffraction grating one at a time will cause an interference pattern on average but whose individual course is -- as far as we know -- unpredictable.
This flies in the face of the idea that the universe is perfectly predictable.
> The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level
Indeed.. an axiomatic religious belief that has incredible amounts of evidence and that has proven very useful, but for the reason I mentioned above, certainly could not be the case. We shouldn't confuse the laws of statistics either certainty, even if the law of large numbers usually works.
> Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently?
I mean there are hundreds of them at this point. Passing single electrons or photons or buckeyballs through diffraction gratings (humans too!, we think). The stern Gerlach experiment. I can go on. Determining the individual spin states of entangled pairs of particles.
> Lastly, if someone did produce an experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is, an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the same, but the result of the experiment being different, then the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible would be wrong
Well like I said we have lots of experiments whose results are different and who we cannot predict (some of which the math says we can never know), and yet, at the macro level we do science anyway because of our religious belief that it usually is okay.
For someone who purports to defend science, I'm shocked at the level of ignorance yet arrogance in this comment.
It is only unpredictable if you confine yourself to a single branch. If you embrace Many Worlds and simulate things accordingly, creating branches as needed, the result of such simulation is consistent and reproducible.
Wavefunction collapse has no 'woo'. It's simply the application of a non-commutative operator. Many worlds has 'woo' because it supposes the existence of infinitely many unobservable worlds. Thomas Aquinas question of how many angels are on the head of a pin seems to be a more fruitful exercise. At least the head of a pin can be given a quantified size. On the other hand, no one can tell you where these multiverses exist. How they exist. What measure they occupy, or anything else. They are as unreal as angels. Unless you believe in them (which is fine, just admit it).
Everyone admits to being unable to predict individual quantum interactions. My point is that above the quantum level these interactions don't have much of an effect. The reason that I didn't assume you were talking about these interactions is because you seemed to be rejecting scientific observations altogether. The context of your comment was in replying to the comment that "everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it." Your response didn't read at all like you were talking about quantum interactions because you could have just said that. In fact it is usually common in such threads to reply "but what about quantum interactions?" to such comments. The way I read "a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality" was that you disagreed that the equations in physics textbooks will change at some point. The reason I thought that was the context was "Everything is governed by laws" so I thought you were saying that the laws are not unchanging.
Now reading your post, you seem to actually agree with most current scientific understanding. You don't actually seems to be saying that the laws of physics will change, Ask any physicist if some classical interaction will certainly happen the way it should. They will not say that it will happen with 100% certainty but rather that it is extremely likely that it will happen that way.
>an axiomatic religious belief that has incredible amounts of evidence
ie. not axiomatic.
>and yet, at the macro level we do science anyway because of our religious belief that it usually is okay.
I'm confused by what you are saying here. You agree that we can understand quantum interactions within "the laws of statistics" even if we can't know them for certain. So why would we change what we do on the classical level based on that? You can just add "extreme likelihood of following this equation" to every classical equation. How would you do science differently?
Additionally, what claim do you think is only being held together by the idea that the rules of physics are constant?
It seems like what you really might mean is "due to quantum level interactions, an inorganic object that reproduces the same classical effects of the brain will not have consciousness." Is that correct?
You should really be doing a bit more defense here given how completely off base your initial comment was, but whatever.
> Everyone admits to being unable to predict individual quantum interactions.
No.. not everyone, including you, before this comment. You asked for experiments that do not produce the same results, and I gave you several examples. That in and of itself refuted your initial arguments.
> My point is that above the quantum level these interactions don't have much of an effect.
Really depends what you're talking about, it's not true that every macro interaction has no phenomenon that relies on quantum mechanics. In other words, classical physics cannot explain several macro phenomenon.
> The reason that I didn't assume you were talking about these interactions is because you seemed to be rejecting scientific observations altogether.
That's your assumption not mine. If I were you, I'd think about why I made it.
> everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it.
> Your response didn't read at all like you were talking about quantum interactions because you could have just said that. In fact it is usually common in such threads to reply "but what about quantum interactions?" to such comments. The way I read "a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality" was that you disagreed that the equations in physics textbooks will change at some point. The reason I thought that was the context was "Everything is governed by laws" so I thought you were saying that the laws are not unchanging.
In other words, you are upset when I pointed out that science itself relies on unprovable assumptions. Again, that is not my problem to resolve. The inner tension between the aspect of science where we discover laws and the reality of the universe, which is that it seemingly randomly chooses what to do, is a tension for you to resolve, not me. But the belief that all things obey laws is a religious one. It is is an unprovable one, and when such interactions were discovered caused a major metaphysical problem for scientists, which you completely gloss over.
> Now reading your post, you seem to actually agree with most current scientific understanding. You don't actually seems to be saying that the laws of physics will change, Ask any physicist if some classical interaction will certainly happen the way it should. They will not say that it will happen with 100% certainty but rather that it is extremely likely that it will happen that way.
The 'current scientific understanding' that not every scientist shares. In response to the knowledge that the universe is not predictable, some scientists have simply accepted that and have relaxed their initial claim (which is, again, a religious one) that while the universe is not fully predictable, its macro phenomena can be described with certainty. That's one resolution. Some claim yet more esoteric ones, for example, that we live in a simulation (again, a religious belief). Some claim that the universe branches(again a religious belief, since it's unprovable). The only claim here that does not rely in some unseen reality is the first, which, again, is a major departure from what science was.
> I'm confused by what you are saying here. You agree that we can understand quantum interactions within "the laws of statistics" even if we can't know them for certain
Sure, in a colloquial sense, we can understand them. At no point did I refute this point, but accepting it is an implicit rejection of the comment I replied to that everything follows laws. A better restatement might be that 'as far as we know, many things seem to follow predictable patterns at sufficiently high levels of complexity', which is a very different statement.
> Additionally, what claim do you think is only being held together by the idea that the rules of physics are constant?
I'm not sure, but either way, this question is not on me to answer, because the person I responded to was the one claiming that conscious is physically explainable using the now-disproven idea that the universe is predictable at every level. Certainly, again, based on what we just said, brains might be using some unknown laws of physics, given that neurons do indeed operate at the molecular/atomic level (individual enzymes and neurotransmitters... who knows).
Finally,
> The way I read "a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality" was that you disagreed that the equations in physics textbooks will change at some point.
You have no possible way of knowing whether they will or won't. In fact, some things become easier to explain about our own universe if they did indeed change, but I digress, because -- again -- no one has any clue. The belief that physics won't change is a prime example of a religious belief in science. The belief in a firm un-changing reality governed by principle un-changing laws. It's telling that this is a common aspect of divinity in the monotheistic religions that birthed science. More specifically, in the Christian West's view, this is the 'immutability' of God. I would argue from a humanist perspective that this belief in God's constancy (as opposed to the fickleness of nature spirits) is what gave birth to Western science.
Now that I've defended myself, I'm going to say a few words about this interaction. Firstly, you admit (thank you) that you made a few assumptions based on my framing of the commenter's belief system. I have noticed that many science-minded people get upset when you point out that science also comes with a set of beliefs that are tacitly accepted as true without any proof. I'm not sure why this is the case, since it seems most human endeavors ultimately do, but the response to this, instead of curiosity, was -- from my perspective -- wild accusations of not believing in science. To the contrary... I believe in science -- a lot. It's proven incredibly useful, and also, I do believe the universe follows laws, even if we can't see it. But I just admit it's a belief and move on with my life instead of being zealous about it.
>No.. not everyone, including you, before this comment.
It's interesting how you deny that classical equations really hold true yet you will comment on what I actually believe.
>You asked for experiments that do not produce the same results, and I gave you several examples.
What I really meant was experiments that do not follow the laws we have so far discovered about nature. In the classical realm, that means experiments that do not produce the same results. In the quantum world, it means a histogram that is not in line with the expected probability (assuming n is large enough). Nobody had mentioned quantum randomness at that point so there was no need to mention it. And if you can run an experiment that produces an unexpected histogram in some quantum field, yes, you will get a Nobel prize. I think that I could have worded it better to include quantum effects, but it still was clear in my opinion that I was talking about the rules we have discovered so far not changing, as I said at the end "what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?" It is clear in this question that I am talking about the laws being static, not that every individual particle's movement can be predicted absolutely, even though that is essentially true in the classical world, which was what I was referring to in when I said experiments produce the same results.
>it's not true that every macro interaction has no phenomenon that relies on quantum mechanics
Ok. But there is no classical effect where quantum randomness is observed.
>That's your assumption not mine. If I were you, I'd think about why I made it.
I made that assumption because you called science a religion (which I still disagree about). Most people that call science a religion do not believe in science at all. For example there are a lot of people that do not believe in germ theory or believe that the earth is flat. These are generally the people that called science a religion. Being that you didn't make your point very clearly, that is what it sounded like you were saying, given the context.
>In other words, you are upset when I pointed out that science itself relies on unprovable assumptions
I just didn't understand the point you are making. In fact, I am still unclear on whether you believe that the laws of physics are static or not. It seems your main point now is that you cannot definitely determine future events because of quantum randomness. But that all future events can be definitely determined is not something science relies upon. "The belief that all things obey laws" is not something that science relies upon, given "law" is defined as an algorithm whose inputs are any material conditions and outputs are exact location of that material at some given time step. This is not what was meant by "Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it." We are not talking about the movements of individual particles here.
>Sure, in a colloquial sense, we can understand them [...] but accepting it is an implicit rejection of the comment I replied to that everything follows laws
But that was said in a colloquial sense. We can use the probability distributions we find in nature to build things. And when our histogram looks more like a straight line than a curve we can safely rely on it. Also, I don't know were you got your definition of the word "law" but "the second law of thermodynamics," for example, is a probability, and we call that a law. Technically I could leave a cup of hot water out in a cold room and it would get even hotter, it just isn't statistically probable. And we call that observed probability the second law of thermodynamics. If someone said "I will use the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow to inform my decision of buying sunscreen" would you tell him that he should really say "as far as we know, many things, including the sun, seem to follow predictable patterns at sufficiently high levels of complexity leading me to buy sunscreen?"
>[some scientists now claim] that while the universe is not fully predictable, its macro phenomena can be described with certainty.
Please cite one physics journal where this claim is made. No physicist will say that quantum randomness cannot possibly have an effect on the macro scale. The claim is that it is extremely unlikely to do so, just like it is extremely unlikely that my hot cup of water will get hotter in a cold room.
>The only claim here that does not rely in some unseen reality is the first, which, again, is a major departure from what science was.
Ok, and? Your claim was that it was axiomatic. If scientists have departed from this idea, it was not axiomatic or religious. Scientists also parted from Newtonian gravity. What point are you making here.
>> Additionally, what claim do you think is only being held together by the idea that the rules of physics are constant?
>I'm not sure, but either way, this question is not on me to answer
"science itself relies on unprovable assumptions"
"science is ultimately a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality"
>brains might be using some unknown laws of physics, given that neurons do indeed operate at the molecular/atomic level (individual enzymes and neurotransmitters... who knows).
This is completely false. The brain does not operate at the atomic level. It actually operates at a level above the atomic level. It is a bit higher than that of modern day computer processors, which have a gate size of about 45 nm. It is also clear that it is the neurons that cause the brains activity, and conceptually neurons have no reliance on any atomic effects at all. (Similar to how logic gates have no reliance on atomic effects, and can be carried out by hand, just very slowly).
>You have no possible way of knowing whether they will or won't
What point are you making here? The world could end do to physics expiring right after finish reading my comment. That is true but a useless statement. Nobody disagrees with this point they just don't preface all their statements like "in event that the laws of physics don't drastically change tomorrow, do you want to get something to eat?"
>The belief that physics won't change is a prime example of a religious belief in science
Science doesn't say that physics won't change. Science doesn't say anything. All science does is give us observations. It's not like science pops out of a microscope after you do an experiment and says "now you have discovered my next lesson, right that down in the textbook of science." You cannot definitely accept anything as true the way you describe. You cannot even definitely accept that what you see is real. For example the quantum randomness that you see might not be real. You can't actually make a single positive statement beyond the rules of thought (which are axiomatic, or religious as you would say).
>It's telling that this is a common aspect of divinity in the monotheistic religions that birthed science.
What about the Romans' complete lack of scientific advancement? What about Greek science and Babylonian mathematics? The Scientific revolution was started by Christian Universities beginning to use Greek works (for example that of Aristotle and Eudoxus).
>you made a few assumptions based on my framing of the commenter's belief system
Yes, but you could have made your point much more clear.
>I have noticed that many science-minded people get upset when you point out that science also comes with a set of beliefs that are tacitly accepted as true without any proof
Are you referring to ZFC? Or the three rules of thought? Or Occam's Razor?
>wild accusations of not believing in science [...] I believe in science -- a lot
There is no such thing as believing in science
>I do believe the universe follows laws
That is a belief. That makes you "religious" in your terms. Yet you said we should "take an irreligious look at things." An irreligious look at things, under your definition, would be to make zero positive statements.
> it means a histogram that is not in line with the expected probability (assuming n is large enough)
Oh I see so you deny the idea that carrying out the same quantum experiment could result in a very unlikely outcome.
> Ok. But there is no classical effect where quantum randomness is observed.
c
> I made that assumption because you called science a religion (which I still disagree about).
I did not. I said science is based on religious beliefs about the underlying nature of reality. Namely that it is constant and follows laws.
> We can use the probability distributions we find in nature to build things
Are we talking engineering or science?
> The claim is that it is extremely unlikely to do so, just like it is extremely unlikely that my hot cup of water will get hotter in a cold room.
Then how are you getting your histograms to always match?
> Ok, and? Your claim was that it was axiomatic. If scientists have departed from this idea, it was not axiomatic or religious. Scientists also parted from Newtonian gravity. What point are you making here.
Well science originally was a belief that the universe was like an automaton, following predictable laws deterministically. Today that is not the case, which means that the universe does not observe deterministic laws, which is what the comment I replied to insinuated. You seem to have correctly given up on this, but still express a belief
> This is completely false. The brain does not operate at the atomic level.
It really depends on what you mean by 'operates'. Potassium/Sodium ions are fundamental to brain workings.
> Nobody disagrees with this point they just don't preface all their statements like "in event that the laws of physics don't drastically change tomorrow, do you want to get something to eat?"
You literally said the laws of physics don't change.
> All science does is give us observations
Right, and from those observations, they do not deny the possibility that the universe follows laws. However, you constantly make the positive statement that the universe does follow laws. Again, a religious statement. I have not made any inconsistent statement. I have said I believe, as you do, that the universe follows laws, but I am honest in that that's religious.
> Yes, but you could have made your point much more clear.
But if I did that you would still be thinking your scientific belief system is based on reason, instead of religious.
> Are you referring to ZFC? Or the three rules of thought? Or Occam's Razor?
I mainly meant the belief that the universe follows laws at all.
> An irreligious look at things, under your definition, would be to make zero positive statements.
That's correct. Positive statements require a belief system that will inevitably contain axiomatic laws. These laws are religious in nature. Even if they have no reference to the divine, they are taken on faith. A common one today is a belief in an immutable universe.
>Oh I see so you deny the idea that carrying out the same quantum experiment could result in a very unlikely outcome.
No. Did you read what you quoted? Specifically "(assuming n is large enough)". I am talking about the aggregate result of multiple experiments. Perhaps " if you can run an experiment that produces an unexpected histogram" should say "run a set of experiments" or something like that. Although this should be clear because you cannot make a histogram with one sample.
>c
?
>I did not. I said science is based on religious beliefs about the underlying nature of reality. Namely that it is constant and follows laws.
You said "science is ultimately a religious enterprise." Its hard to read that any other way. But even giving you the benefit of the doubt, it just shows why I took issue with your initial comment. What you have said here vs. the initial comment is drastically different, even if you really meant the same thing (which I am not fully convinced of).
>Well science originally was a belief that the universe was like an automaton, following predictable laws deterministically.
What do you mean by "science was a belief?" That was a conclusion many early physicists made, but that doesn't say anything about science itself. It is not either accurate to say that science is a belief that there is quantum randomness. That is a scientific theory or you can perhaps call it a scientific belief, but that belief is not science itslef.
>which is what the comment I replied to insinuated.
It didn't. It is referring to effective determinism, ie. that classical phenomena are very weakly affect by quantum randomness, such that we can rely on it to replicate those effects.
>You seem to have correctly given up on this, but still express a belief
I never held this position and have tried to explain that to you twice already:
'You can just add "extreme likelihood of following this equation" to every classical equation.'
'What I really meant was experiments that do not follow the laws we have so far discovered about nature. In the classical realm, that means experiments that do not produce the same results. In the quantum world, it means a histogram that is not in line with the expected probability (assuming n is large enough). Nobody had mentioned quantum randomness at that point so there was no need to mention it. '
>It really depends on what you mean by 'operates'. Potassium/Sodium ions are fundamental to brain workings.
It doesn't. Sodium potassium gates are well understood and do not rely on quantum randomness.
>You literally said the laws of physics don't change.
That is because I am operating withing the world of positive statements beyond axioms. Within your proposed world of however I would clarify that my promise to go to get something to eat is only in the event that the laws of physics don't change (which we can accept as possible since we cannot accept anything as true at all within your world. In fact I suppose even that statement allowed for to much as it implied that I think the laws of physics currently exist at all for that to change).
>However, you constantly make the positive statement that the universe does follow laws. Again, a religious statement.
It is not a certain statement, just a likely one.
>But if I did that you would still be thinking your scientific belief system is based on reason, instead of religious.
Under your definition of religious, reason and religion are not mutually exclusive. I actually challenge you to define reason here.
>That's correct. Positive statements require a belief system that will inevitably contain axiomatic laws.
But you said that we "take an irreligious look at things and try to keep focus on just what we observe." Yet that itself requires a positive statement that my observations are real. And if we take an irreligious look at things under your definition then we will arrive at zero conclusions.
Reminder to my point from above: "Please cite one physics journal where this claim [that scientists now claim that while the universe is not fully predictable, its macro phenomena can be described with certainty] is made. No physicist will say that quantum randomness cannot possibly have an effect on the macro scale. The claim is that it is extremely unlikely to do so, just like it is extremely unlikely that my hot cup of water will get hotter in a cold room."
>try to keep focus on just what we observe
That's all science is though – making observations. Writing hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?